I know that person! Why can’t I remember?

Abstract

The butcher-on-the-bus phenomenon refers to repeatedly encountering a person in a specific context and later failing to recognize them in a novel context. Despite the failure to recognize the person, a strong sense of familiarity occurs. Although this phenomenon commonly occurs, little is known about its underlying cause. One possibility is that the informativeness of the context increases the strength of the association between context and identity. This association may then interfere with recognizing the same person in a novel context. This study was designed to examine the following question: Is recognition of faces in previously-unseen contexts influenced by the allocation of attention to previously-seen contexts? Attention to context was manipulated by altering whether the context provided identity-specific information such as the target’s occupation or hobbies, and whether the context was consistent (mimicking the experience of repeatedly encountering a face in the same context) or varied. Unexpectedly, I found that identities first encountered in an informative context were later recognized better in a new context than those encountered in uninformative contexts. This suggests that the informativeness of context provides a powerful cue that aids in the learning of a new face, surpassing the benefit of exposure to within-person variability.